Twelve-Inch Richard
Home of the Impertinent

Today I’m going to be talking about female bad-asses!  You know the type I’m talking about… true life Ripley’s of Aliens fame, Alice’s of Resident Evil and Sarah Connor of the Terminator films.  In other words, real life examples of women who are not only tougher than most men but who kick-ass with the best of us.
 

Do you remember sitting through those boring history lectures about World Wars given to you by even more boring teachers?  If you’re anything like me you’d rather be tied to a burning stake and have meth-crazed ferrets chew on your nether regions than to sit through a class where the teacher simply recited facts and figures while never having even been to the places he or she happened to be teaching about.
 

BUT, I wonder if your attitude would change if the teacher happened to be someone who could shoot your ass from a quarter mile away while you ran screaming in a dozen different directions like a little girl being chased by a hoard of rabid coyotes? 
 

Well, students in Russia got the chance to find out how good their attention span was when Lyudmila Pavlichenko stood up and taught them.  Who the hell is Lyudmila Pavlichenko you ask?  She is credited as being the BEST female sniper in WWII.  How good could a woman sniper be you might ask?  The first question you might want to ask is what type of scope did this woman use.  I mean, let’s be serious, if she were using some type of prototype Russian super scope that would allow you to sit on your couch, see through walls and shoot the balls off a fly from 200 yards then her accomplishments wouldn’t be all that great.  But, NO… this is WAY back in 1941 and she was using a 4 power scope.  Hell, my son has a .22 with 5 power scope! 

So, if you did a body count of every person ever killed in a Rambo movie, this young woman… between June of 1941 and June of 1942 when she was wounded by mortar fire… blew 309 soldiers away – including 39 other snipers!!! – while Stallone, in all his pretend bad-assery only pretend killed 210 people.  Lyudmila joined the Russian army’s 25th Rifle Division as a private and retired as a Major!  She not only kicked ass and took names but she looked good while doing it! 

I can only imagine that no student in her class EVER turned in an assignment late!

 

Milunka Savic
 

If you think Lyudmila was a force to be reckoned with, wait till you hear about Milunka Savic.  She’s the type of warrior that would make the Terminator shit a steel brick.  At the age of 24, in 1912, the young Serbian decided to join the all-male armed forces and did so by cutting her hair off, taping her breasts to her chest, getting some of her men folks clothes and going to the recruiting center.  Back then there wasn’t much of a physical exam that took place unless you’d already had half your ass shot off so no one noticed Milunka didn’t have ‘man parts.’  Either that or no one gave a damn if she was a guy or not… they were probably just happy to have someone who wanted in on the business of kicking some turkish ass… and for Milunka… business was REALLY GOOD!
 

During the first Balkan war Milunka stood side by side her male counterparts fighting on the frontlines, shooting the hell out of anyone who was wearing anything the resembled the Ottoman Empire’s uniform, gutting men twice her size with a bayonetted rifle, throwing fist-size grenades into fox holes and basically kicking the shit out of her enemies.
 

Around the time Milunka turned 25 the second Balkwan war started up and she pulled up her man panties and went right back to tossing grenades and firing at her newest enemies with the abandon of a stormtrooper who’d been on a three day steroid-laced crack binge and was imagining himself to be Darth Vader. 
 

It wasn’t until the Battle of Bregalnitsa that Milunka’s ruse came to an end.  She had already led a squad of men over and through barbed wire barriers, past razor sharp bayonets, under rifle and pistol shots and straight through machine gun, cannon and artillery fire 9 times.  On her 10^th charge the private plowed right into an exploding grenade, was blown off the ground and ended up being shipped to the army hospital so the docs could dig shrapnel out of just about every part of her body.  That was when a doctor made the shocking discovery that Milunka had either had a sex-change operation caused by the grenade explosion or that she was, in reality, a woman! 
 

Whatever he thought the doc patched her up and sent her to her commanding officer to explain herself.  No one knows exactly how the conversation went but some think it was something like this:  “Yeah, of course I’m a woman dumb-ass.  But, I’m still the soldier who just spent a week of my life shoving my bayonet through the guts of people you wouldn’t want climbing up your ass, tossing grenades through the air like I was giving away lollipops in a Serbian parade and shooting enough ammo to build a damn tank from.  So, when do I get back to the action?”
 

After her CO offered to transfer Milunka to the nursing corp where she could do woman’s work she basically told him he could stick the transfer where the sun don’t shine and that she wouldn’t go anywhere she wasn’t allowed to carry a rifle and shoot the living hell out of someone. 
 

She was told he would consider giving her back her old job but he needed a day to think about it.  She stood at attention and said, “I’ll wait.”  Around an hour later the CO came back and not only allowed her to stay in the infantry but actually promoted her to Junior Sergeant.  I guess he figured she had more cajoney’s than most of the men he knew. 
 

Another birthday came and went and the 26 year old, newly minted Sergeant Milunka Savic, who was the commander of the Iron Regiment's Assault Bomber Squad, found herself in the Battle of the Kolubara River.  Her regiment faced an enemy that outnumbered them nearly two to one.

 

Actually, it was more like the Austro-Hungarian soldiers faced a really pissed off, very war saavy and highly motivated Milunka.  Like a scene out of a Tarintino flick, Milunka took out across the field of battle shooting anything that moved in front of her, weaving and bobbing like a politician who had just been outed as a sheep loving pervert trying to avoid cameras, and chucking grenades like they were confetti.  Along the way she single-handedly attacked an Austrian trench full of soldiers who couldn’t have been more surprised if dancing squirrels holding cold mugs of Austrian lager had appeared in front of them.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t lager clutching squirrels they saw but a half-crazed woman equipped with a rifle and two bandoliers of grenades strapped across both her shoulders and wearing another for a belt just to accentuate her outfit.  The 20 grown men inside the trench who were supposed to be war-hardened soldiers took one look at Milunka and, after pissing themselves, threw their guns down and surrendered unconditionally.

 

Not satisfied with having just captured almost two dozen soldiers by herself, or not wanting to do all paperwork involved in such a mass surrender, Milunka got out of the trench and approached enemy machine gun nests like a fat man approaches a gallon of ice cream… without hesitation or mercy.  Throwing grenades like an NFL quarterback she cleared out so many machine gunners that she earned the moniker “The Bomber of Kolubara.”

 

The only thing that even slowed this woman warrior down was, once again, shrapnel from an exploding shell.  Only this time the shrapnel embedded itself in her head!  The enemy probably breathed a collective sigh of relief seeing as how shrapnel in one’s head usually puts one out of commission for the rest of the war. 

 

Not Milunka!  Like Rocky Balboa who keeps getting the living shit kicked out of him only to rise up and fight one more time… Milunka said, “I’m not going to let a little white hot, smouldering steel in my head stop me!   Get out of my damn way.” Or something to that effect.  Either way, no one wanted to stand in her way and soon enough she was back on the frontlines and wound up attacking another trench and this time captured 23 soldiers all by her lonesome.

 

By the end of 1916 Milunka was wounded 7 more times and, each time, like the ever-ready bunny (though a lot more deadly) she just kept going and going and going.  Finally, after fighting in so many battles, she was awarded so many medals that if she’d worn all of them at the same time and during daytime everyone would have either went blind or the earth around her would have been scorched from the reflection.

 

Not everyone believed that a woman could be such a hardcore badass… especially one incredibly stupid French officer who ignorantly bet Milunka wasn’t as good at throwing grenades as he had heard.  He was so certain that her myth wouldn’t hold up to reality that he placed a bottle of extremely expensive cognac 131 feet from Milunka and bet 19 more of the same that she couldn’t destroy the single bottle with only one grenade.  Needless to say, he was doubly humiliated when the grenade she threw hit it’s mark and her unit got snockered on his dime (or, in this case, enough dimes he could have bought a mansion in the Hamptons).

 

After Milunka retired she found a man who could handle the fact that her testosterone was at least ten times that of any man, had a child and adopted three more children who had been orphaned by war. 

 

You’d think that this would be a nice way to end the story of a war hero… but NO!   In 1940, at the age of 52, the Germans invaded the town in which she lived and she ended up spending 10 months in a concentration camp after ticking off the German commanders by not going to a dinner she’d been invited to.  She survived the concentration camp basically because every soldier there knew better than to mess with her if he wanted to go home after the war still equipped with his family jewels.

 

At the age of 84, in 1973, Milunka, was still the worlds most decorated female soldier and, undoubtedly badass grandmother who had ever lived.